“Nobody wants to see a live thylacine more than I do,” says Australian mammal expert Dr Jack Ashby, assistant director of the University of Cambridge’s Museum of Zoology. “For one thing, the presence of a large predator would be great for ecological integrity.”
- What happened to the remains of the last known thylacine?
- The thylacine became extinct in the 1960s… or did it?
But there are buts. How has Tasmania changed in the decades since the thylacine, a wolf-sized and shaped carnivorous marsupial, went extinct decades ago; how would people, farmers especially, react and – perhaps most important of all – is it really possible to bring it back from oblivion?
The biosciences company Colossal is increasingly bullish about its prospects of recreating a thylacine. The firm recently announced that, thanks to a skinned head preserved in ethanol that has been in the hands of Museums Victoria for more than 100 years, it has now been able to complete more than 99.9 per cent of the species genome, and that total completion should now be possible.
“It’s rare to have a sample that allows you to push the envelope in ancient DNA methods to such an extent,” says Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s chief science officer. “We’ve delivered a record-breaking ancient genome that will accelerate our thylacine de-extinction project.”
But how do you bring back the thylacine when you don’t have any females in which to grow an embryo? The solution – the fat-tailed dunnart.
Though superficially reminiscent to a mouse and very different to a thylacine, the fat-tailed dunnart is nevertheless one of its closest-living relatives. Both belong to the Dasyuridae family (which also includes quolls and the Tasmanian devil), a group of mostly small, insectivorous marsupials.
Colossal’s plan is to edit the genome of the dunnart to make it as close as possible to the thylacine’s and then insert this into an egg cell and grow the embryo that way. Scientists say the resulting animal won’t be a thylacine but a close approximation of one.
Ashby is both sceptical of the how scientifically possible this will be and concerned about the impact any recreated thylacines could have on still-living and vulnerable species such as the devil, which has been so devastated by an infectious cancer in recent decades.
“Would having a thylacine-like animal be better than having nothing?” Ashby asks. “It’s hard to argue that it would be – it’s an interesting ethical question. But Colossal is making significant advances in marsupial conservation genetics, and what they are doing will produce valuable information that could help with the marsupial extinction crisis in Australia.”
Main image: 108-year-old thylacine head/Colossal Biosciences
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